Lifie

Lifie provides students with the knowledge they really need to thrive in today's economy.Startup/business
Oakland, California, United States

Lifie is an on-line platform were high school students crowdsource the education and career guidance they urgently need. Students' questions get routed to the appropriate adults in their extended social networks. Adults can help students in short bits of time, without big commitments. Students get knowledge they need to thrive in today's economy.

America is losing competitiveness because too many of our young poeple are not moving on to productive and properous careers. Most of them don't have the information they need to understand all their career pathways possibilities. Students are cut off from the world outside their schools.

Lifie is the only on-line platform dedicated to crowd-sourced guidance from adults to students.Lifie is a web- and mobile-based service where students can pose education and career questions that get routed to adults in their extended social network, who then answer the questions at their convenience. All communications are posted to the Lifie site, and stored in a searchable database of career and education pathways.

Lifie is a safe and fun for students. Students can explore and discover by watching conversations between other students and adults. Lifie is specifically designed for teenagers – it has intelligent quizzes and thought-provoking polls but not extensive reading. Students can try on different careers though their avatars and build their own “Lifie Crew” – a group of adults who will answer their questions first.

Lifie lets adults help on their own terms – no big commitment.Lifie pushes questions to adults where it works for them – email inbox, text, smartphone app, or on the web. Questions are routed according to what topics the adult chooses to participate in– alma maters, careers, programs like Peace Corps, Lifie’s simple, intuitive interface is navigable by amateur web users – Lifie makes volunteering accessible.

Lifie is a social enterprise. Once we have established proof of concept and user base, we will seek to be profitable through four product lines:

Consumer products for students and their families: self-assessments,webinars, Lifie-brand guides, Lifie-affiliated experts.

B2B products: Lifie will create a product for organizations such as College Track and College Summit that wish to create private guidance communities or wish to push content to students in specific high schools or cities. Lifie’s tools complement career sites such as LinkedIn, Monster and Careerbuilder.com and the $150 billion/year private sector job training industry.

Public products: Lifie’s product line will also include offerings to $18 billion/year public workforce development sector, which includes both national and local programs.

Global data products: Lifie’s database will produce aggregate information about teens, jobs and education that will be valuable to marketers and a global student audience eager to break into the American education system and job market.

Market Opportunity and Size:

While there are 16 million high school students in the US, Lifie will start with teachers and guidance counselors who are eager to help students find their path but do not have the time or knowledge. Being part of the TFA network gives Lifie access to thousands of such teachers.

Usership would also grow through invitations and through notifications on social sites.

Lifie can grow globally, and beyond high school -- adults can now expect 6-8 careers in a lifetime. 60% of students won't finish an associates or bachelors degree by their mid-twenties - career guidance products for this population hardly exist. Lifie will grow to handle delicate but high-demand areas like health, relationships, and family.

Lifie is the only on-line platform purposefully designed to serve both teenagers and amateur web-using adults, safely.

Lifie is the only on-line platform is designed purposefully around students finding a pathway to career succes after high school.

The Lifie team understands this complex problem deeply, as it stretches between students, families, institutions and mobile/web technology and the crowd.

A patchwork of publicly and privately funded programs only reach a few students. Californians invest minimally in providing guidance to high school students - our current ratio of students to guidance counselor is 945 to 1. Solutions like Citizen Schools, College Summit and mentoring programs are difficult to scale. Only select families have resources to access private coaching services.

No on-line crowd-sourced education and career guidance exists. Lack of focus on student/adult interaction keep services like Quora or LinkedIn from becoming thriving platforms for regular adults with regular students. Student research shows they don’t use Facebook or MySpace for education and career exploration - only social exploration.